IIA Toolshed #3

Social Media Monitoring

Tooler’s Choice?

We looked at four social media monitoring tools, no one is the winner because they are all very different and serve different needs.

Market leader Radian6 from salesforce is powerful and provides all you need for monitoring and listening, but it is truly an enterprise solution and requires a hefty investment. For enterprise, Radian6 is one of the best there is.

Mention is accessibly priced tool for medium sized companies, with budget, who have reasonably large web and social search monitoring needs and wish to centralised the management of these. Ideal for those who have report generating needs and wish to involve large teams.

New Irish offering, Olytico is an interesting software and a service tool. You tell Olytico what keywords you want to track, they set up the searches for you, and you use the tool to view results. It neatly overcomes the problem that many face with social media monitoring tools of only being as good as your search terms, but this at times can be a bit limiting. We decided that Olytico is the perfect tool for agencies who need to report back on how far their client’s brand travelled across the social media spaces.

Social Bakers is probably best suited to SME’s, although it only really monitors what’s being said about your own social media, rather than listening widely about broader conversations. It serves a purpose for bringing reporting together and does that very well, providing benchmark industry data.

General Information

What is IIA Toolshed? IIA Toolshed is a group of digital marketers & digital experts who know how difficult it is to keep up with the ever changing array of tools at our fingertips, to supposedly make doing business easier! To make things simpler, we’ve come together to test, evaluate and share the reviews of a broad selection of tools & technologies, to ultimately make the decision easier for you, when choosing what tools might best suit your business needs. At the IIA Toolshed, we come together every 6 weeks to evaluate a set of tools for a particular business objective, and we’ll publish our findings right here.

Radian6 is a Social Media listening and monitoring tool owned by Salesforce.com. It is heavily integrated with other Salesforce products (Buddy Media) and features. Very often used as part of the Salesforce Marketing Cloud package. They are repackaging Radian6 with new features under a new name called Social Studio

Mention is a online social media monitoring tool that searches the main social media channels and incorporates alerts, responding capability, task assignment, reporting and analysis.

Software AND a service! It's a hybrid between self service and managed. You tell Olytico what you want to track, they set it up for you, and you can then do the monitoring yourself

Simple to use. Set up automated searches by keywords and/or company name. Search by location for better results. One of the best things about Radian6 is its ability to turn searches into really digestible reports. Within seconds I can search, measure and identify business opportunities. It is great for analysing sentiment, monitoring competitors and identifying influencers and brand advocates.

Reasonably simple set up. Does a very broad search and generates good reports. Allows you to respond to mentions or allocate to team members.

Simple to use. It's all set up for you. Can view activity by day, and assign content to team members. Cannot track whether they have actually done something with it or not. It trawls all the main social platforms (FB pages plus open groups, not profiles), Flickr, Insta, not that strong on Pinterest, plus forums, and news sites.

It's easy to use at basic level. Free Trial offered for 2 weeks. Heavily focused on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube. May be more customisation possible but not obvious.

Does it give meaningful results for Ireland?

Yes - easy to limit results to Ireland only

Yes. Strong on Twitter especially when hashtaged

Yes. Strong on Ireland as you'd expect from an Irish tool.

Yes, as strong as any other country

Is There Anything I Should Know?

Salesforce seem very cloak and dagger in giving anyone access to it unless they are a large multinational and already using the Salesforce platform. Very difficult to get a price list from them.
They can penalise organisations when high volumes of data.

Range of functionality appears limited for the price. Much of the functionality could be achieved with free tools like google alerts and topsy/social mention. Low threshold on number of mentions means upgrade for busy accounts.

Workflow exists in that you can tick the box and assign content to team members. Team collaboration is coming, where you can mark it as done or dealt with. Good support function.

Ideally you should set up more than one business for benchmarking, so ideally you're monitoring you and your competition. I like the presentation format exportable reports. Love reports about which types of posts perform best, which times of day, and days of week, also industry benchmarks

Who would you recommend it for?

Organisations already using the Salesforce.com platform. Great for big companies with a sizable budget and a large community to monitor and listen to. Possibly a good tool for Digital Agencies who want to offer listening and monitoring services to their clients. Enterprise.

Medium to large organisations with budget who wish to utilise the team collaboration features. Suitable for disparate enterprises centralising brand/company mentions who appear over a wide variety of online sites.

Agencies needing to track client mentions. Or brands/businesses who are being talked about widely and not just on FB and TW. Good example given was Jameson Film Festival, who were talked about widely for a month. No annual contract means they can sign up and use the tool just for the month.

Medium size businesses who are

Cost inc VAT

Expensive - Pricing in Feb 2013 - The good folks at Radian6 got back to me and it turns out that they have changed their pricing model. There are now two different models:

Business Model: $600 / month for up to 10,000 mentions
Agency Model: $950 / month for up to 1 million mentions
Historical Data: $100 / month going back to 2008 (except Twitter that goes back to 2010) Source Some hidden charges especially when there are peaks in activity, which seems counter intuitive

Starter $29, Growth $99, Company $299, Enterprise $799 (per month)

€700 per month, without limitation on keywords or Results or seat/user. If you want separate feeds per channel, €200 per additional channel. Single chanel is good 2-3 clients..

"Free Trial for 2 weeks. $120 per month thereafter. I believe there are other more tiered products, but v difficult to get access, and default is to 120 per month. Social Bakers Statistics = free. Marketing Suite = paid. Additional
upgrade features = Analytics (customised reporting, benchmarking etc),
Builder (Plan, publish, measure from single place), Advertising (plugin
to FB & Twitter ads), Listening."

Some hidden charges especially when there are peaks in activity, which seems counter intuitive

You can’t experiment with searches

No API integration

Customisable dashboard

3

3

1

2

Product Intuitiveness / UI

3

2

4

3

Team Collaboration Features?

3

3

2

1

Are we going to continue using it?

0

0

2

3

Total Score

35

32

32

34

What’s next from the IIA Toolshed? Social Media Design Tools in July.

Summary:

All opinions are based on the personal views and experiences of the individual ‘toolers’ as business professionals and digital marketers.Each tool is reviewed by 2+ individuals to ensure objectivity. Opinions expressed by IIA Toolshed are not the opinions of any organisation, or group of organisations, who participate. Time is given freely by all members for this initiative.

IIA Toolshed #1

Screencasting Tools

Tooler’s Choice? Camtasia because of the range of functionality, ease of use, support and additional use for easy video editing.

General Information

And we’re off! We’re delighted to welcome you to the inaugural post from the IIA Toolshed!

What is IIA Toolshed? IIA Toolshed is a group of digital marketers & digital experts who know how difficult it is to keep up with the ever changing array of tools at our fingertips, to supposedly make doing business easier! To make things simpler, we’ve come together to test, evaluate and share the reviews of a broad selection of tools & technologies, to ultimately make the decision easier for you, when choosing what tools might best suit your business needs. At the IIA Toolshed, we come together every 6 weeks to evaluate a set of tools for a particular business objective, and we’ll publish our findings right here.

TOPIC 1: Screencasting Tools First up to test were a range of screencasting tools! What is Screencasting, you ask?? Screencasting is a really neat process of recording what’s happening on your screen as you do it. You can include narration as part of the recording, to explain exactly what you’re doing on screen, all from your own computer or laptop. Screencasting software is often used for short “how-to” videos and online tutorials. It can be a really helpful way to show a customer how to do something technical, as if you’re by their side! Here’s what we found about the four tools we reviewed:

An easy-to-use screen recorder that acts as powerful video editor by recording your voice and on screen actions. It also allow the easy import of additional media and advanced editing functions.

A low cost easy to use screen capture tool for the Mac.

Entry level screencasting & screen capture tool

What’s It Like To Use?

Easy to use. Simple to install. Free product. It's got a lot of functionality that make it too advanced for the average Joe.

Intuitive and very flexible piece of software. Good tutorials. Trial download with only an email address required and full functionality for 30 days. Designed to have you up and running with projects very quickly. Lots of functionality and export options.

Screencast Maker allows you to record your entire screen or just part of it. It also allows to narrate audio and even allows you to include video from your webcam. Output in.mov.

Free, easy to download, you can record activity you carry out on your screen, to share with others, including recording narration for additional explanation. Output in swf format and png for images

Is There Anything I Should Know?

If you are an Apple app store maker and you want to make videos to sell your product, this is the tool for you.

Camtasia has restrictions but its core abilities of creating professional screencasts is more than enough. Navigation and editing were easy with good ‘undo’ and keyboard shortcuts meaning you don't to start from scratch with mistakes. Transitions, inserting text, adding pointer arrows and animation are simple with drag and drop. Editing and cutting out sections was fast and less fiddly than other software.
Export as an MP4 was simple along with other sharing options for YouTube etc al.
As an MP4 it was simple to upload natively to other platforms and to insert on websites.
It took approximately 4 hours to go from first open to a reasonably polished looking screen cast.

There is a free trial available at screencastmaker.com where you can create screencasts of 2 minutes or less, but €4.99 will get you the full version. Screencast Maker is great for start ups and SMEs on a shoe string budget.

What’s next from the IIA Toolshed? Well stay tuned, because every 6 weeks we’ll be reviewing another set of tools. Next up, we’re reviewing Social Media Publishing tools. Which ones? Well you’ll have to come back to find out… all will be revealed in early May!

Summary: Overall, it’s fair to say that Camtasia is the standard that most people expect, and around the table it was commonly agreed that it had the best feature set. Thereafter Screencastmaker is a good option for those who are a bit more cash-strapped, but keen to get going. The other tools are more likely to be used for those getting started, or for internal communications.

All opinions are based on the personal views and experiences of the individual ‘toolers’ as business professionals and digital marketers.Each tool is reviewed by 2+ individuals to ensure objectivity. Opinions expressed by IIA Toolshed are not the opinions of any organisation, or group of organisations, who participate. Time is given freely by all members for this initiative.